Brian Lemay was a key animator on the Television Series in 1986/87 and in general has been involved with a lot of other great series and productions in his career as an animator. In late 2006, I was fortunate enough to be able to conduct an in-depth interview with him regarding his work on The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin and he provided all I was hoping for and more. The interview is so in-depth (including pictures) that I didn't really feel it would look good stuffed into one page, so I decided to break this one up question by question, starting on this page and then moving on. Follow the links to the next question. If you would like to ask Brian a question, he has been kind enough to offer to answer- you can email the questions to me at josh@teddyruxpinonline.org NOTICE: THIS INTERVIEW IS THE COPYRIGHTED (C) PROPERTY OF TEDDY RUXPIN ONLINE. THIS INTERVIEW IS NOT ALLOWED TO BE RE-DISTRIBUTED OR COPIED IN ANY FASHION WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION OF TEDDY RUXPIN ONLINE. THANK YOU.

Teddy Ruxpin Online: First, if you would like, just tell us a little about yourself, your duties working with Atkinson on the Teddy project, and the other projects you've worked on. Brian Lemay:

I went to Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario and took the Animation program for two years then dropped out to get a job in 1980. I was hired at Nelvana as an inbetweener on a 1/2 hour special titled "Take Me Up To The Ballgame". Nelvana was already in preproduction on the feature film, "Rock and Rule" and were basically hiring for this. I was an assistant animator to Tom Sito. We worked on incidental characters in the film and most notably the Beast sequence at the end of the film.

After Rock and Rule was completed, everyone was laid off. I was called back in January the next year to be the character designer on the show "Inspector Gadget". I was responsible for pretty much every character in the show, except Gadget, Penny, Brain, Quimby, and The Claw.

After Gadget and another short lay-off where I worked on some Hanna-Barbera shows, I went back to work at Nelvana on "Care Bears" in the layout department. They then got the contract to do the "Ewoks" and "Droids" shows for George Lucas. After these shows were done, they went back to Care Bears again. Hanna-Barbera opened up a farm studio just down the street and I started picking up some freelance work from them.

I'd go to work at Nelvana at 9:00 - 12:00 then run down the street and pick up some work from Hanna-Barbera, grab a quick sandwich on the way back to Nelvana, work on Carebears from 1:00 - 5:00, drive home and work on Punky Brewster, Flintstone Kids, Smurfs, etc. 'til about 1:00 in the morning, get up the next day, drive to Nelvana and do the whole thing again.

I did this for about a month and noticed the difference in my paycheques. I decided to quit Nelvana and focus all my energy on the Hanna-Barbera stuff. This lasted for about 8 months until I went in one day and they told me to pack up my stuff because they were closing the Toronto studio down.

I went home kind of dazed as to what to do next when I got a call from a friend who had gone up to Ottawa to work at Atkinson's. He said they were looking for Animation Posers for this show called "Teddy Ruxpin". I didn't really care what it was called as long as it meant work. I phoned the studio the next day and spoke to the supervisor of the posing department. It turned out that it was a college buddy of mine from Sheridan that I sat next to in class. The conversation kinda went like this:
Brian: "Hi Mark. Hows it going?"
Mark: "Pretty good."
Brian: "I hear you're looking for posers."
Mark: "Yeah, you need a job?"
Brian: "Yeah, when do you need me?"
Mark: "Can you come up tomorrow?"
Brian: "I'll be there. See you tomorrow."
Mark: "O.k., bye."

So, I hopped in my car and drove 6 hours up to Ottawa, Met with Mark and got the job right on the spot. I then walked down the street and found a house with an apartment to rent, signed the lease, went out and bought a T.V. and moved in.
The posing department was responsible for taking the layout poses and putting them "on model" and basically key animating the scene. Even though the show was animated in Taiwan or Korea (I'm not really sure which it was) we still had to plan out the actions for them. I started in around show 5.

As the shows came through I was noticing some really big problems with the layouts and the overall work flow from the layout department. They had never produced a 64 show series before and weren't properly set up for the work involved. Having worked at both Nelvana and Hanna-Barbera and using their finely tuned systems, I could see the problems quite clearly.

I went to the owner of the studio and met with him to discuss the situation and I proposed a new system to make things work more efficiently. He asked me to be the assistant Layout Supervisor and get things going. I shuffled things around a bit and got a library system working so that we wouldn't be generating so many original backgrounds all the time when we could re-use the common locations such as Gimmick's house. This helped save a lot of time and also cut the budget by a bit.

I think it was somewhere around show 22 that I formally took over the layout department as Senior Supervisor. We had to hire on a bunch of new layout artists (some of which we had to retrain from scratch). I hired on a few friends that I had worked with at Nelvana. My place became their place to sleep until they could find an apartment of their own. It was a lot of fun.

We used to play ball hockey during the summer and ice hockey during the winter, baseball, football. We'd all go out after work and have a lot of fun.

2nd Part of Brian's Interview